Like Canadian doctor Norman Bethune, English journalist George Hogg was a jaded westerner who washed up in China just when that trouble-plagued nation needed his talents, even if he wasn’t quite aware he possessed them.

The Children of Huang Shi, which opens here Friday (June 6), is set in the war-torn 1930s and stars Match Point’s Irish-born Jonathan Rhys Meyers as the young Brit. Australia’s Radha Mitchell (Melinda and Melinda) plays the tough nurse who helps him spirit 60 Chinese orphans away from brutal Japanese invaders, while also protecting them from the Nationalist army, which is conscripting underage males.

Director Roger Spottiswoode, in this case working from a script by Jane Hawksley and veteran journalist James MacManus, has been sighted in these dramatic parts before. Twenty-five years ago, he made Under Fire, which offered Nick Nolte as a macho reporter caught up in the Nicaraguan revolution. Along the way, he also directed one James Bond flick (1997’s Tomorrow Never Dies), the influential AIDS television drama And the Band Played On, and last year’s fictionalization of Canadian general Roméo Dallaire’s Rwanda experience, Shake Hands With the Devil.

The filmmaker, born in Canada but raised in England, has long had an inclination toward stories about people caught up in troubles not their own.

“I find those people the most interesting,” declares the 63-year-old director, on the phone from his home in New York City. “They often have no sense of boundaries, and are complicated and unpredictable. When I’m not making studio films, I much prefer characters who don’t pick up guns and kill people.”

Having relaxed borders and a lot of logistical experience certainly can help when undertaking a project as massive as this one.

“It had lots of locations, lots of children, and a Chinese-speaking crew,” Spottiswoode said. “It was a fascinating challenge, because it was about someone who immersed himself in China, and I tried to do the same. I feel I really allowed the crew to participate fully, and they made it much more Chinese than it would have been.”

His cinematographer, Zhao Xiaoding, had shot films such as Hero and House of Flying Daggers, and the director was impressed by his huge art department’s resourcefulness.

“They had done a lot of period films and had travelled all over the country looking for old China. It’s very hard to find—unimaginably difficult. They would drive us for days and then we would come upon some ancient monastery that the Cultural Revolution had missed somehow.”

With the combined destructive power of the Second World War, Mao Zedong’s crazed upheaval of the late 1960s, and manic building during the current economic boom, there’s not much left of the good stuff, Spottiswoode observes.

“Fortunately, there’s this one very enterprising studio that is buying up old buildings all over China and moving them, brick by brick and timber by timber, to one location, about five hours from Shanghai. It’s owned by a very wealthy entrepreneur, and he has created seven lots around this town: there’s a full-size Forbidden City; a water village with small houses around canals; and there’s one late-19th-century village, where our orphanage was found.”

The much-travelled director says this faux-antique approach applies to tourist sites springing up around the country—including thrown-together, garishly painted temples where “they are stuck with having a few real monks hanging around.”

Remarkably, for an Anglo-Canadian directing a Chinese-Australian production made, in part, with German money, he encountered little interference from producers or government officials.

“In the Chinese system, everything has to be vetted in the script stage. They asked only for minor changes; they said there were no bandits, ever—even in pre-Communist China. And it didn’t seem worth fighting for, so we let that go. But there were no travel restrictions, and we were treated, essentially, as a Chinese film.”

Remarkably, the finished film—which also features strong supporting work from Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon stars Michelle Yeoh as a complicated merchant and Chow Yun-Fat as a suave Maoist guerrilla—has been more widely criticized in the West than where it was made.

“Some of the reviews think it focuses too much on the foreigners, while the Chinese like it just fine. They see it as a tribute to someone who’s really a hero to them; they don’t happen to see him as just a white guy, that’s all. We did have some unexpected reactions, though. Several people asked us, ‘How can you have a capitalist playing a Communist?’ So you never know what you’re going to get.”

A sense of place and of purpose is important to the filmmaker, who was born here because his father, director Raymond Spottiswoode, came from the U.K. as the youngest member of a mostly Scottish delegation of filmmakers, led by John Grierson, that arrived here just before World War II. At Ottawa’s invitation, Grierson drafted legislation that led to the creation of the National Film Board of Canada, and these tough Highlanders—with sparks of humour and idealism adding life to their innate sense of realism—came to dominate what would be known as the Canadian documentary tradition.

The younger Spottiswoode, who currently divides his time between Manhattan and Montreal, remembers well family visits from animator Norman McLaren and the enigmatic Grierson.

“I saw him as a very lively Scotsman who had an interesting view of the world,” Spottiswoode said of Grierson. “He was so compelling. I was only small, but I remember him holding forth about everything. He was very short, you know, but he was the only person in the room you’d notice. He was generally irascible, funny, sarcastic, drunk, and a visionary who was always questioning things. You felt that he was a kind of centre of growth, tossing ideas at people and saying, ‘C’mon, run with this, do this, try that.’ A remarkable fellow.”

The Grierson group also went south to make films intended to help pull the U.S. into the war. Later, several of the men returned to Europe and kept in touch with the Spottiswoodes, after they also moved back to England.

“They’d come by and piss off my mother by offering us Scotch. I was eight, maybe 10 years old, and Grierson would hand me a glass, which I was supposed to drink without stopping. ‘There ya go, laddie. That’ll make a man of ya.’

“He was very charming, and I suppose it had some effect on my decision to be a filmmaker. Again, it’s these people with no sense of boundaries, who somehow have discovered, or believe, that they can do anything. And then they can. So many of our limitations are of our own creation. John Grierson and George Hogg were smart, able people, to be sure. But the important thing was that they knew they could do things. And so no one could stop them.”